University of Michigan

Undocumented students who’ve grown up in Michigan may soon be eligible for in-state tuition at one of the state’s biggest universities.

On Thursday, the regents at the University of Michigan will vote on a new policy that will redefine what it means to be an in-state student at the university.

Provost Martha Pollock, who took office this May, said the changes being proposed would benefit more than the state’s undocumented students.

From today's press release:

A new language has been discovered in a remote aboriginal community of Lajamanu in the Northern Territory of Australia.

Dr. Carmel O’Shannessy, a linguist at the University of Michigan, first discovered the new language while studying in Lajamanu. The language spoken there is Warlpiri – an aboriginal language unrelated to English.

Over the last decade O’Shannessy has documented the emergence of “Light Warlpiri” or Warlpiri rampaku in the region.

It's a safe bet to state that one of the greatest sports rivalries in America is the one between Michigan and Ohio State.

Well, there's a "Beat Michigan" campaign happening right now in Buckeye-land that even the most die-hard Wolverine fan could not complain about.

A 12-year-old Ohio State fan---a true Ohio State fan---has been fighting brain cancer for the past two years. And to get him through the grueling chemo to help him marshal every bit of energy towards beating that cancer, young Grant Reed has named his tumor "Michigan."

And guess what, it's working! And there's nothing like some Internet fame to take a kid's mind off of the tough realities of a cancer battle.

Grant's dad, Troy Reed, joined us today.

Listen to the full interview above.

The University of Michigan says a group of U of M students are scheduled to leave Egypt Thursday as unrest continues in that country.   

The eight students were studying at the American University in Cairo when the Egyptian military ousted the government.    They were midway through a two-month cultural program offered through the U-M Center for Global and Intercultural Study, affiliated with the College of Literature Science, and the Arts. 

Other U of M students are scheduled to leave for Jordan and Morocco.

He spent four years in prison after he was convicted in 2009 on an arson charge. But now he is free after a team of lawyers from the University of Michigan's Innocence Clinic proved he was wrongfully convicted.

The Innocence Clinic team said Caminata was convicted on "junk science."

The Clinic has more on Caminata's conviction:

More than 400,000 children are currently in foster care in the U.S. Once a child has entered the system, they remain there on average for nearly two years, according to a federal report. Our State of Opportunity team looked into a unique program that’s working to prevent kids in Michigan from even entering foster care in the first place.

Michigan’s state constitutional amendment barring racial preferences in university admissions and other public institutions might be the next major case dealing with affirmative action laws in the United States.

The U.S. Supreme Court decided today not to decide a Texas affirmative action case where a white student challenged the University of Texas’s admission policy that includes race as one of its deciding factors. 

The University of Michigan’s Board of Regents set the 2013-2014 tuition price yesterday afternoon -

• a 1.1% increase for in-state students, and a 3.2% increase for out of state students

And Michigan State University's regents set their increase this morning - 

• a 2.8% tuition rate increase

The two joined six other state universities in the state that have set their sticker prices for the coming academic year.

This year, regents for all the public universities in Michigan will be seeing a slight increase in state funding.

In a recently passed higher education budget, the state’s legislators afforded $31.1 million towards Michigan’s public colleges and universities — a 1.8% increase from 2012.

Still, in the face of a continued decrease in higher education funding (Gov. Rick Snyder’s 2011 budget called for a 15% decrease in state appropriations to colleges), balancing affordable tuition and sufficient revenue is more and more challenging for universities.

This year marks the lowest tuition rate increase for University of Michigan undergraduate students in nearly 30 years.

The 1.1% increase, or $148 per year for the average undergrad, puts U of M's in-state tuition at $13,142 per year. Out-of-state students will have to foot a slightly bigger bill. U of M regents approved a 3.2% for those students, which is an additional $1,270 per year, on average.

The university also marked another financial success for the upcoming term.

A new poll shows a slim majority of Michiganders support natural gas fracking, though they want the industry to face more regulations and pay more taxes.

Michigan’s natural gas industry has grown as companies have used a technique called Hydraulic Fracturing, or fracking, to break up shale deposits releasing natural gas.

Critics complain fracking is contaminating drinking water and causing other environmental problems.

In the aftermath of school shootings, theater shootings, and bombings, the question of security screening has become real and important.

How do we balance privacy concerns and rights with the need to screen for potential threats?

A University of Michigan professor is working on that challenge: building a better security detector.

Dr Kamal Sarabondi is a professor of electrical engineering, and he's the director of the Radiation Laboratory at the University of Michigan.

He's gotten funding from the U.S. Department of Defense and is developing a long-range radar technology as a means to detect a concealed object. He explains what it is and how it differs from what we have today.

Listen to the full interview above.

This is what nearly 6,000 University of Michigan graduates look like (courtesy of commencement speaker Dick Costolo's Twitter):

Commencement @umich My view twitter.com/dickc/status/3…

— dick costolo (@dickc) May 4, 2013

Costolo made a point to live tweet the photo before he began his address to the class of 2013.

A new University of Michigan survey finds many parents are distracted behind the wheel.

The U-M researchers surveyed more than 600 parents to find out what distractions they face while driving with their children.

ANN ARBOR, Mich. (AP) - Twitter chief executive Dick Costolo took a picture of thousands of graduates at the University of Michigan - and then tweeted it, of course.

Costolo joked to the crowd that it "should only take a second." The Michigan alumnus was back on campus Saturday to receive an honorary doctor of laws degree. He told graduates to be bold, figure out what they love to do and "go do that."

Ethan Shirley and Alex Carney both hail from the University of Michigan and are co founders of the Pantanal Music Exchange.

Shirley founded the Pantanal Center for Education and Research is a non profit organization that focuses on science, technology and sustainable community development.

Last summer, Shirley and Carney were setting up some science and technology workshops at the Nazaré orphanage in rural Brazil when the director of the orphanage mentioned in passing that there was a room full of unused instruments.

This week in review, Rina Miller and Jack Lessenberry discuss the possible plan to lower auto insurance rates in the state, a bill to require drug tests for welfare recipients, and the arrests made at the University of Michigan over immigration protests.

The president of the University of Michigan is stepping down.

Mary Sue Coleman officially announced her retirement today: 

The University of Michigan deserves the best in a leader, and I want to give the Board ample time to select the next president. I am committed to working with the Board members to ensure a smooth leadership transition.

Every college has its traditions.

Some of them become popular nationally. That's what happened in March of 1974 on college campuses around the country.

What were college students doing? Streaking.

If you were in college or remember the spring of 1974, you'll remember that naked explosion on campus. 

The streaking phenomenon at first was not widespread nor was it well known. The first news reports of these events had to define streaking.  The earliest events happened on Florida's campus.

In February and in early March, news networks began reporting the story. It began to catch the attention of the New York Times and that's when streaking was in full swing.

Jim Tobin, a writer and historian, described the buildup of the campus phenomenon at the University of Michigan.

"The wildfire effect that happened in the first week of March was the week that Michigan students were on their spring break, so no one was in Ann Arbor, but all of the students were hearing about it and dying to get back in Ann Arbor to take part," said Tobin. "That Monday after spring break, there were announcements that there would be a couple of events that would take place."

Tobin describes that past streaks were more of a solo thing and that Michigan students wanted to introduce the idea of mass streaks.

By the Tuesday after Spring Break, and after announcements in the Michigan Daily, groups gathered  at lunch and in the evening to streak. The groups had about 70 students Tobin explains, "The real crowd was the 1,000 of students who came to watch the streakers," he said.

With previous streaks being smaller and more spontaneous, Ann Arbor became home to the first mass streak.

Listen to the full interview above.